Happy Sunday! 

This whole week I've had ESPN on 24/7 for the US Open tournament, anyone else? Tennis is such a fascinating game about mental strength and doing the extra thing — taking the extra step on a forehand, jumping with a little extra power to get over the ball on a serve, or making sure your racket head doesn't drop in your backswing. If you haven't gotten a chance to watch some of the games yet, I highly recommend it. There's also a really fascinating side to the business of tennis — Tim covers a lot of the cool stuff.

Anyways, I hope that if you've got this email open on a Sunday, you're feeling relaxed, you've got your feet up, and you've got some delicious, pH-balanced, and chilled water in your other hand (don't tell me you like Evian).

A big thank you to everyone who continues to listen to Limited Supply, around the world!! This past week, Moiz and I talked about Allbirds' earnings, scaling a new brand, and procurement. As of today, we're a top 10 marketing podcast in the USA, Canada, Australia, India, Philippines, Chile, Indonesia, Malaysia, Kenya, Iceland, Luxembourg, Latvia, Lithuania, Ghana, and Bahrain. That is insane. THANK YOU!

In today's email, I wanted to run through what everyone is talking about — November promos and their setup. In addition to the basics, I'll talk through some of the extra things we're thinking about with our clients or owned brands.

For us CPG'ers, Black Friday is our Super Bowl. If you've worked in eCommerce, CPG, retail, or marketing for a few years, by this point, your family also knows that Thanksgiving Week is a stressful one. Shoutout to my mom who always makes the best of the super bowl week in November ❤️.

I'm going to break this email down into 6 parts:

  1. Planning the promotions
  2. Marketing channels
  3. Prepare your assets
  4. Dig into the data
  5. Test new content
  6. Submit for approval

Planning the Promotions

If you're a subscriber who's been with me for a bit, you know I love squeezing as many promotions in, as possible, around Black Friday. You're getting a ton of traffic, and people's intent to buy is at an all-time high, so let's maximize that for your brand.

With all the promos, you want to optimize for:

  • Delighting existing customers
  • Introducing new customers with a good mix of products
  • High AOV / margin
  • Selling-through inventory that's been sitting for too long (put it in your bundles)

On Black Friday, I like to go high AOV, high discount, and high margin. High AOV bundles that are 2-3x your normal AOV. 30-50% discount, justified by the high AOV + high margin. 

Saturday and Sunday, I like to run something different. It keeps your customers remembering that they NEED to buy the Friday offer next year if they don't want to miss out. It also allows you to sell into a category of products that has lesser sell-through. For example, if you're Buffy, you might run a big comforter offer on Friday, and then light up a deal on the sheets or pillow on Saturday/Sunday. Saturday is also known as Small Business Saturday, thank you AMEX, so use that messaging to your advantage — if you're doing less than $100M, you're a small business.

For Cyber Monday and Cyber Week (outside of Tuesday), in general, I enjoy a good tiered discount. Spend $100, get 10% off. Spend $200, get 25% off. Spend 300, get 35% off.

On Giving Tuesday, flip the promotion on its head. Instead of a discount, give a % of the order to a charity. We recently ran this with Givz, where we set 3 charities customers could choose to donate to and saw a higher-than-expected number of orders and AOV. Psychologically, it's a reason to go ahead and make a purchase, and not feel bad about spending money.

Drink some water, you're probably dehydrated.

Marketing Channels

Now Q4 in general is when all the world's largest companies deploy their biggest sum of advertising dollars. Naturally, this causes increases in CPMs across the board, especially paid social. So I started to think — if you're a small brand, how can you be smart about this? It's 2 parts.

Part 1 is building your audience now. If you're a brand and plan to go hard on Black Friday to New Year, then you need to be building that list up right now. Optimize that on-site email/SMS capture. Think about what you can give your customers as a fair trade for those CRM records — Discount? A Jolie Water Report? Get creative.

Part 2 is knowing which advertising channels you CAN deploy investment into without seeing CPM inflation. I'm curious to know from you if there are ones that come to mind (there has to be) that I don't mention. Keep in mind, that this part is more of a short-term arbitrage, as the prices could theoretically increase at any time.

Trackside Ads: I've mentioned Adgile before — they wrap trucks running delivery routes with billboards, and then allow you to retarget the mobile device IDs that were within the visibility of the truck on its route. The cost of the truck wrap campaign isn't going to increase depending on the time of the year, or if Adgile signs some big brands for Q4. It might not be the case for next year (depending on the supply of trucks), but I would take advantage this year.

Direct Mail: The cost of paper, postage, and ink doesn't increase just because P&G wants to deploy a ton of money into direct mail. Your CPM won't go up. On the flip side, you are competing for attention when someone opens the mailbox, but direct mail is still a really safe channel to invest in. 

Affiliate: Luckily, affiliates don't charge a higher % of revenue during peak season, it mostly stays the same. If you go to publishers for writing affiliate content pieces, then you might see a higher flat fee (still before the % of revenue driven gets added on top), but generally, most affiliates don't increase prices.


GWP: The cost of making a gift to give for free with purchase stays the same. Use this to your advantage for getting customers who are close, through the finish line. 

Prepare your Assets

Landing Pages: If you're not running landing pages for all your big November sales, you're doing this whole thing wrong. Each promotion should have 2 landing pages — one for new customers and one for existing customers. These two audiences should be spoken to differently, and the page, in general, should be optimized for understanding the promotion, getting in, and checking out.

If you don't have a team internally to build landing pages, I would recommend using HOOX.co — it's a company we spun out of Sharma Brands and we build landers, start to finish (research, wireframing, copywriting, UI design, development) and then you get the Unbounce file to duplicate and test as many version as you want. On average, we are doubling the conversion rate, and some clients have then increased conversion by 2.5-3x after duplicating and testing multiple versions on their own. Grab a HOOX page by clicking here, or DM me on Twitter with any questions.

Website Banners & Pages: Your homepage and collections page should have site banners that speak to the promotions you're running. Your PDP should speak directly to bundling, dollars saved, and why this is such a no-brainer to purchase on Black Friday. 

Ad Creative: Similar to landing pages, you should have ad creative that speaks to your new audiences, differently than existing CRM/retargeting audiences. And if you have the resources, then you're also exporting multiple hooks and formats (TikTok and Instagram ads shouldn't look the same). 

Emails & Texts: In addition to announcing your promos to existing and new customers (2 variations), you should have emails for reminders (last call for XXXX) or segmented audiences (openers but non-clickers or clickers but non-purchasers), depending on list size.

Dig into the Data

If you remember my email from a couple of weeks ago, about tagging orders and customers more efficiently, you'll love this.

For DTC Super Bowl week, I love to:

  • Create customer segments of your top 5% and 10% of customers based on LTV
  • Create audiences based on the highest-retained cohorts
  • Create audiences based on successful customer acquisition campaigns (only works if you know which customers came from which ads)
  • Understand the onboarding merchandising flow for your best customers — what did they buy, how much did they spend, what was their discount, etc.
  • Understand your best ad copy, types of creative (videos, animations, UGC, etc) and CTA copy (on your website) that drive the highest conversion
  • Double check shipping margins, costs, packaging costs, and overall 3PL-related costs

Test New Content

On your website, you're going to get so much additional traffic. Put the traffic to use, by lighting up A/B tests with small %'s of traffic.

On landing pages, insert new content modules (a comparison chart, new iconography to show benefits, new ways to layout the “add to cart” button and shop module, etc) to test, and, in addition to the numbers, look at site visitor recordings with Microsoft Clarity (it's free).

Submit for Approval

If you work with clients, create and submit everything early. If you're internal at a brand, submit for approvals internally, sooner than later.

And if you're spending money with daddy Zuck, then submit all your ads for review as soon as possible. You don't want to get caught up "In Review" because you submitted too late (and reviews generally take longer this time of year). 

Ok, now on to some fun stuff... and drink some water!

Vendor of the Week:

minisocial — the go-to creator hub for powerful brand-focused UGC ads.

Have you ever wondered how brands like Olipop, Native, or Hydrant compile so much UGC to distribute on organic social and as ads? It's not always *just* customers, a lot of times it's through a platform like minisocial — a spot where creators can opt-in to receive products, and then create their own set of content out of it for you to run!

Now before you think, "Ok, I don't need this, I'm scrolling," let me tell you why you should at least take a 15-minute call with Kirsten (the founder):

  1. All the content that is produced by minisocial is fully licensed out the gate. You don't need to deal with additional contracts or try to figure out in 5 months when a new employee joins the marketing team if you're allowed to still run that content.
  2. You can set up and launch a campaign to collect assets within 10 minutes. 10 minutes is what minisocial claims most customers can get it done in, but let's say it takes 20... that's still a great return on your time spent.
  3. On platforms like Reels and TikTok, minisocial creators are creators... so they know what works on the platforms... which means that your campaign to collect assets, when it gets posted to Reels or TikTok, has a great chance of blowing up. In fact, most of their campaigns outperform traditional influencer campaigns on Reels and TikTok.
  4. They are reasonably priced. If you are spending even $10k/month on ads, you'd be silly to not try minisocial out for $1,700.

All in all, in my opinion, working with minisocial is a steal of a deal. $1,700 might get you a single TikTok post with some creators, but it might get you a viral video with minisocial, in addition to the folder of assets you'll receive to run as ads.

I highly recommend you take 15 minutes to talk with Kirsten about how they can design a campaign specific to your creative needs. If you want to learn more about minisocial in general, check out their website by clicking here.

Click this link to book time on Kirsten's calendar and get the Nik Sharma discount!

Jobs of the Week:

HOOX — Senior UX Designer

Outstanding Foods — Social Media Manager

Y'all — Performance Marketing Specialist

Question of the Week:

What is your MUST-get product from your favorite grocery store?

Mine is probably the Crunchy Chili Onion at Trader Joe's. It just works on everything.

Brand of the Week:

MrBeast Burger — The most innovative fast-food restaurant launched in the last decade.

Today, Jimmy (aka MrBeast) launched the first permanent MrBeast Burger restaurant at the American Dream Mall. If you're not familiar, Beast Burger was a genius business idea leveraging small individually-owned restaurants that were facing bankruptcy and Jimmy's massive audience to create a nationally-serving ghost kitchen experience.

The ingredients, recipes, packaging, etc. are all the same around the country. The difference is the restaurants that make the orders before they're delivered by GrubHub, Uber Eats, or DoorDash, are all different.


Jimmy and the Night Media team (Jimmy's management/business team) never stop pushing boundaries. It's truly amazing. Order yourself a burger here, or start making MrBeast Burgers here.

That's all for this week

I hope today's email was helpful to get some ideas going for Black Friday and the holidays, in general. If you're in the USA or work with a US-based company, enjoy your day off tomorrow.

Stay hydrated, get a sweat session in, enjoy a nice walk without your phone (unless that's not safe), and have an incredible Labor Day & upcoming 4-day week!